


something to make yourself sick on

by chaparral_crown



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Choking, Crying, Depression, Dubiously Consensual Blow Jobs, Episode: s02e09 Shiizakana, Gen, Gratuitous Overthinking, Hannibal Lecter Loves Will Graham, M/M, Masturbation, Mental Health Issues, Season/Series 02, Service Kink, Will is a Mess, tear licking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:01:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26764729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaparral_crown/pseuds/chaparral_crown
Summary: Maybe if he says it enough times, it will be conferred on him. Behold, one mental health, unused and unsoiled! The thought must shine through when he speaks - he can’t see it, but he feels Hannibal’s smile grow teeth, actually amused now.(Will Graham is having a hard time adjusting to life after prison, and takes a day off following the discovery of Randall Tier's first kill. Predictably and ironically, Hannibal insists on being part of it. Set during S2: Shiizakana.)
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 53
Kudos: 225





	something to make yourself sick on

They call it institutionalization because you can’t function without the institution. 

It’s something of a learned misconception on the police force in New Orleans ( _and presumably everywhere else you think_ ), snickering coming from the mouths of people who will likely never experience it. The acting assumption of criminality while riding in Crown Victoria cruisers into crime scenes, because you and your pals know at least one person there is recently out of the system, and looking for a way back in. 

Will, still young at the time and never acclimatized to a schedule himself, steeped in other people’s tragedies between case files and late nights and sad families trying to work through complicated thoughts, doesn’t find it particularly funny or fair. He’s only two years into his position though, and smart cops don’t disagree out loud. Smart cops fall in line and become like everyone else, or they quit. Will opts to quit. 

“I’m sorry to see you go, Graham,” the police chief had said at the time. “I had hoped you’d grow out of taking things home and leave your work at the office when you clock out, but with that last arrest and the stabbing, I understand why you’d feel the way you do.” Will had laughed at that, the way he couldn’t laugh at the running jokes between officers. 

He gets his own pass at being institutionalized years later. While the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane is hardly a paragon of orderly practices and rigorous scheduling while it’s under the hand of Frederick Chilton, there are a few things that are hard for Will to shake off, even after leaving. 

Breakfast is watery oatmeal with dry milk particles trying to intermix with freeze-dried apples. ( _This is considered very fancy compared to the flavorless slop you would get in a proper prison, Frederick assures you. Frederick’s condescending smile slides away when you assure him it is still flavorless slop, though the antipsychotics and SSRIs add an intriguing bitter complexity._ ) He is not afforded outdoor time the way that the “lower-risk” inhabitants are, but he does get the novelty of going to therapy sessions with an idiot at the helm of them at 2:00 pm, because Frederick wants to make sure he gets an opportunity to enjoy his own lunch hour and still be done monitoring the after effects of the sodium amytal before 5:00 pm so he can go home “like civilized people”. The hall lights go dim at 8:30 pm with the quiet like an empty school hall, some children still shrieking from the classrooms, but otherwise still and without the mark of time until 7:00 am the following morning. The orderlies will begin checking from cell to cell to make sure everyone’s alive, like this is a zoo, and all the animals are sickly. 

( _Yes, comes the answer - yes, you are still sick. Please leave your cage bars alone, please don’t rattle sticks against them to catch your attention. Captivity is a hell you don’t wish on any wild thing_.) 

It was a simpler time. Will’s life is growing very complicated these days.

\---

The one thing that has stayed consistent is murder. He’d laugh about that too, but it’s really not a laughing matter. If anything, it’s an embarrassing focus point between his psychiatrist-turned-friend-turned-something being as his heels all the time, and his boss telling him it’s his job to resolve it. A corpse is practically a relief at this point.

There had been no meaning in it, the deconstruction of the truck driver’s neck and belly as random and messy as roadkill. Even with that in mind, it’s almost discreet, how he’s pulled up onto the roof of the truck cab, a plinth for him to be taken apart by the sun and other carnivorous things. He’s staring upwards in the morning light, eyes open, made pale and featureless by rigor-mortis and late winter frost. Everything that belongs to him is accounted for, but he’s not using it anymore. 

Will looks at it and thinks all sing-song and tired, _oh, there’s me_.

To the side, Hannibal stands and looks at the same things. Will doesn’t pretend to know what he thinks at all. 

The crime is a strange one for Will. He’s in the business of unraveling thought processes, sequences triggered by human trauma, the misery of the human condition and how people use their hands to push all that onto their victims. This is senseless, and indulgent the way sticking your tongue out to catch snowflakes is. The victim is inconsequential - they just wanted to feel them melt on their tongue. 

It doesn’t feel correct to say it’s an animal’s fault even if the features of it are there, because honestly, this isn’t the frontier anymore. There probably hasn’t been a bear or mountain lion this far out from the Appalachian mountains since the Revolutionary War. Exotics don’t kill on command, and not turn and kill the person with the leash. Junk dogs don’t have the pressure in their mouths to exert that kind of force on a spine. Dogs lick at messes, they track their own filth where they can, guileless and foolish in that they are alive and they only understand that they must do as they are afforded opportunity to. 

Sure there’s a mess, but it’s all been stepped around. The death itself is senseless, but the articulation of how it comes to be is purposeful. So there must be a man behind the animal. 

Will relates to that too. 

“He's urbanizing his animal,” he says, still an incomplete thought, but feeling the edge out. He’s not sure he buys it, but he’s being told to sell something anyway. “Moving closer to the city, adapting it to bigger prey.”

“He's not denying its natural instincts,” says Hannibal, more admiring of the strange mess and the novelty of nature’s savagery compared to man’s emotional acts of targeted violence. Maybe he doesn’t actually separate men from animals that much - it would fit what Will understands of him in some ways. “He's evolving them.”

( _You’ve tried to avoid Hannibal, who is billowing hot breath that is white and glowing in the morning sun like a smokestack, who is staring you down, who crowds you when he can. What does he think that will achieve? That you can mutually stare at each other and make the CSI team uncomfortable, like you’re going to lock teeth and tear the other’s throat out because it’s the day’s theme? That eye contact is a sign of affection instead of a sign of aggression?_ )

“It’s bloodsport,” says Jack, but really that’s everything between them these days.

Driving away from the truck stop, leaving the ring of police cars behind and the bulky figures of Jack and Hannibal behind, Will doesn’t feel particularly useful. Price and Zeller gives them what they need to move forward. Jack is disappointed. Hannibal is just there because apparently it’s too much to ask Will back as a formal consultant, and Will, as solid as the slushy snow around them himself after a poor night of sleep, comes when called by Jack and Hannibal because that’s what he _ought_ to do, right? 

\---

He runs an errand when he is done visiting with Peter Bernadone. It is good to see him, and the four walls of Port Haven’s visiting room that crowd the two of them in together, where they can trade secrets and feel the structure of something outside of themselves. 

( _That’s not a normal thing to feel, but you’re contained, and don’t need to feel it as long as you are._ )

The double doors of the Quantico faculty office swing open easily in Will’s grip. He has avoided this moment, the way many errands are avoided. It’s not that Will doesn’t want to go back to regular work - it’s that he doesn’t want to explain why things weren’t regular over and over again.

“It’s so nice to have you back in the building!” says the front desk attendant when she sees him. “Did you go on a trip?”

Her name is Tracy - she’s nice, and drinks a lot of tea that ends up in an orderly row of half-full mugs with the tea bags still in them. She keeps a photo of her niece and her Irish Setter on her desk, next to a small vase of flowers that she brings for herself. **_Know your worth_ ** , says a card she receives on Administrative Assistants Day, whatever the fuck _that_ is. Tracy, with her polished nails and loose fishtail braids, is the image of creature comforts. Will has always liked her in that distant way you like co-workers that stay in their lane. 

Tracy is not much of a gossip, but Tracy is also not typically an idiot, though maybe today she is a well-meaning one by accident. ( _God, you hope it’s well-meaning. Who actually liked you, even before the frame job for murder, cannibalism, and mutilation?_ ) Even she, cloistered with her mugs of tea and quiet lecturers in their offices, would have a hard time avoiding news of Will spending a few months in prison. After all, surely they discussed if they needed to reassign his office. The FBI coming to raid it for evidence with a warrant probably merited her showing the way to it, the same way she does for students and visitors. 

Will gives a wincing smile, because that’s the kind he knows how to make these days. 

“Aside from the incarceration in Baltimore?” he asks, incredulous. “Mostly been staying around home.” 

“Ah, I meant...well, after,” she winces, and adds a little desperately, “but there’s nothing wrong with a little staycation! I took a mental health day just after New Years to reset myself...just too tired from dealing with all the family and the spring semester prep, you know?”

Fresh off the mutilation of the trucker by what appears to be an animal but feels capricious like a man, biting exchanges with Hannibal ( _because who better for you to bite than a predator in your territory_ ), resentfulness with Alana ( _because predators pair with other predators and she’s not accepted that yet_ ), pity for Peter _because he’s a different you and maybe a better one_ ), and a quarter of a year in the keep of a mental institution against his will, he can’t help but laugh a little. It’s the hooting kind, forced from the gut past the lips before you can stop it. 

“Yeah,” Will says with the kind of grin that pulls with hooks and hurts. “I know.” 

\---

Conscious thought, unlike institutionalization, doesn’t build structures. It picks at them like a scab. It prefers to leave scars.

This is how Will finds himself laying on the ground like a socially inept child in the earliest hours of the morning, no closer to sleep than he is to understanding what to do with his life. The ceiling of the farmhouse has plaster swirls in it - it’s luminescent in the dark, where the porch lights outside the windows light it up. A moth is flickering in shadow across it. Will is visually stuck between one arching pass of a trowel where it cuts off another, wondering why the contractor did that, rather than trying to rest, or direct himself in a meaningful way. 

He’s not sure when he should sleep anymore in the absence of the instruction of others. Intellectually, he knows that billions of people manage themselves daily, closing their eyes, and falling into unconsciousness without somebody turning the lights out for him and telling him he’s done for the day. The circadian rhythm waits for the dark hours, and winter in Virginia is truly dark. He knows that he’s tired, and it’s night time, ergo he should close his eyes and fall into whatever dreams his mind has set up along the way. 

( _No one can be fully aware of another human being unless we love them,” says Hannibal, very pale against the bark of a tree. “By that love we see potential in our beloved,” says his red mouth, and you, unaccountably angry to possibly not be loved, pull the rope._ ) 

But no, he’s contemplating the plaster for the third time this week alone with half a face.

There’s a small space beneath the bed in the living room that isn’t taken up by storage that’s hastily crammed underneath. It’s only about half the width of his body - this small justification that he can’t fit the entirety of himself underneath is how he avoids thinking of it as hiding underneath it. He’s just casually laying on the floor, partially obscuring himself. Totally normal. Anyone walking in would just think he’s looking for something, because the fear of people walking in on him in the middle of the night is now a thing apparently. 

( _Hannibal does. Or he did. It bothers and comforts you. The comfort occasionally bothers you too._ ) 

Staring with one eye at the slats of the bed frame and the other at the dark coffered ceiling of his farmhouse, Will rests a hand on Max who has come to lay up against him and steal his warmth. The other rests on his nose and mouth. The air whistles between his fingers, hot and humid. He insists he is not at all upset, and tired, and cratering through the floorboards to the top soil, sandy loam, and bedrock somewhere under that. 

It’s not quite like his idea of post-mortem decay where he can become settled and nothing and rest, or like the trucker who is absent but present and still. Instead he keeps slipping inexorably downwards, the way that rocks sink in water, but there’s no riverbed to come to rest in. The pit of his stomach is so heavy that he wonders how far he can go before the bottom, or if he’ll just surface on the other side of the earth, stripped clean by its core so he can be pushed back up, lighter now. 

The opposite side of the globe from Wolf Trap is the middle of the Pacific, somewhere near the coast of Australia, several miles offshore. ( _You looked it up out of curiosity - one of the dogs digging “halfway to China” in the unkempt garden beds necessitating scientific accuracy if they were to fancifully succeed someday._ ) It’s daytime there now and summer, where it is expected he will be awake and warm. 

He’s afraid he won’t be any better in antipode than he is here - merely unable to sleep in the sun instead of the half-dark of the house, which he guesses is at least a little more biologically acceptable. Fighting nature is harder than fighting nurture.

\--- 

Will feels like hot garbage by the time his alarm usually goes off to start a normal day’s activities. Something properly cooked by the sun, with that urine smell specific to large cities wallowing in their own decay and urbanity - that’s what he is now. This is an improvement from existential dread from the ground in the middle of the night, but he also has his first suggested office hours at 9:30, and he has to account for traffic, and the fact that Jack Crawford is going to find him some more mutilated bodies that he doesn’t know what to say anything about. 

His dogs, big fans of things that smell terrible and probably should be left to rot in a field, swarm him anyway in their usual happy morning dance. This part feels good for a fleeting moment. He lets his hands trace their snouts and heads. They trip over themselves to follow him to the mud room where the laundry is and a door to the backyard of the house, where the kibble clinks like gold into dog dishes. When they settle back in with their breakfast, Will runs a hand over his face, and contemplates the ceiling again, this time standing up.

_What are you doing?_ asks a segment of the white plaster that has a small crack in it. 

It’s an excellent question for a wiser man. What does Will Graham do, not quite fresh out of prison, but certainly fresh out of good ideas and time to come up with more? 

( _You don’t pretend to think of entrapping Hannibal as a good idea, wrapping yourself around him thinking you’re the boa when it feels very much opposite of that. It would have been a better idea to shoot him in his own kitchen and be done with it, but much like pulling a tooth, you have to wiggle it with your tongue and make it_ **_hurt_ ** _before you pull._ )

Will bites the side of his mouth, baggy eyed and exhausted.

( _It’s ok, you think between scales and the pull of wiry muscle against your bones, where they are being utterly crushed. It’s warm where the blood pools._ )

He considers his obligations, and how little sense they make. Quantico doesn't make him resume classes, but he’s doing office hours. The FBI don’t reinstate his Special Agent credentials, but he’s working crime scenes with Crawford, practically under the table in the name of what is disguised as decency, but is actually habit. Usefulness is important. Routine is important. It’s the only routine he has right now. 

_That being said, what are you going to do?_ asks the unfolded shirt from yesterday, thrown over the back of a chair that he should put away or wash. 

There’s a lot of things like that around the house. Will just doesn’t have a lot of mental bandwidth to address them between the onslaught of shit from everyone else. Fuck, even the mint green bag he’s given with his scant few possessions when they let him leave BSHCI is sitting on the counter like an unemptied grocery bag full of rotting fruit, starkly shiny in the kitchen’s overhead light.

There’s nothing wrong with a little staycation, he thinks half joking to himself. 

Would it be so bad to do that? He could, honestly. There’s no orderlies to shuffle him from home to work to wherever disaster strikes today like they did between rooms at the hospital-prison-root cellar he’s kept in. ( _What do you think took root while you were in there?_ ) No court dates, no open case files other than their ( _not_ ) animal attack, which isn’t something to profile as much as something to wait to happen again and draw more observations the way biologists do from taxonomies of mammals. Take a mental health day, he snorts. Reset the schedule. 

( _It won’t fix you, but you haven’t tried it yet either, so who’s to say?_ )

Will contemplates that for a moment. 

He blinks at the plaster. He cracks his neck and turns off his phone, where two more alarms are set to remind him when to leave. He crawls back into bed, sun up or not. Easy enough to follow through once the decision is made. He doesn’t have a schedule, he reasons to himself, so he might as well act like it. 

_Nothing,_ he thinks to himself. _I am going to do absolutely nothing, because there is nothing I_ **_should_ ** _be doing._

\---

He slides between dozing and consciousness for a couple hours. It’s not good sleep because it feels stolen, but it’s something. Dogs come and go from his side, soaking in warmth from him and the sheets before getting restless, ready to go outside and unaccustomed to his presence at this hour. It feels wrong to watch the sunlight mount the window ledge and spill onto the wall in yellow-red brilliance. 

( _Daytime is here now - night falls on your opposite patch of the Indian Ocean in the western reaches of the Great Australian Bight._ ) 

When Will lets the dogs out and they resettle, he lies back down, and considers how best to indulge himself now that sleep is slipping away again. 

Unbidden, and practically speaking, he could masturbate. He’d feel tired again right after, and get another couple hours out of himself, and it’s been a while since he’s felt alone enough to even contemplate it. There’s nothing arousing per se about playing hooky on a weekday, but the theory is the day is for him. If he wants to put his hand on his cock and play at indulgence like their rampaging animal catches snowflakes on his panting mouth, there’s really no reason not to. It’s what everyone jokes about anyway when you’re not visibly dying when you come back to the office, and god forbid he disappoint anyone else.

( _Is there anyone else left to disappoint?_ )

He pulls himself out of his flannel pants, hand idly feeling the lines of his body, the chafe of a white shirt against the head of his cock. Will doesn’t look at himself often outside of necessity. It’s oddly nerve-wracking now that he’s done it, like the spatial absences in his kitchen and living room from the crime scene cleaners and investigators that tore his house apart is as good as a living audience, and he’s never actually alone and he’s investigating his own dick with the ambivalence of a scientist considering the possibility of results. 

Not very sexy, or indulgent. 

The passive pleasantness is there still though, warm hand feeling out the softness of the shaft, the flare of the head. If he leans his head back and stops considering the foreignness of his own body, it’s enjoyable the way a warm bath is. With persistence, it’s the heat of a strong rush of water from the shower, running from neck to spine to hips to legs, chasing down his feet to the drain. Beyond that, the hot rush of blood to his face, cupped on either side by broad hands, his own hands shaking beyond to point a gun at the source of his ire. It’s not the violence that feels good - it’s the juxtaposition. He feels guilty, but that he’s torn something open that feels wonderful. 

( _The hands though, that sparks something else in you - the memory of the laryngeal tube sliding down past your tonsils, the watery tears of sleep and choking sliding from your seizing eyes while you are plumbed in reverse for a hook and an ear. Hannibal held you very careful, you remember that these days, fingers feeling out the hollows of your cartilaginous rings and the apex of your collarbones, eyes tracking the teeth measure marks on the sides of the plastic tube squealing its way into your insides to nest as a snake does. You think he wiped your cheek. You think he smiled._ ) 

Will feels something at that, hand quicker than it has been and a rush of anxiety and arousal chasing down into his belly.

And that’s quite enough of that. 

Will pulls his pants back up and his shirt back down, cock half hard but face fully red and embarrassed. Perhaps an indulgence a little too far for a productive mental health day. Fantasizing about his own oral violation as long as it’s done with careful hands is hardly the picture of good mental health.

He thinks about crying, but that’s not very sexy or indulgent either, so instead he takes a shower. 

\--- 

He gets dressed. No schedule doesn’t mean no unspoken normalcies, and resetting himself is meant to be metaphorical for his brain being perpetually a flaming bus propelling itself into a wall of TVs, and needing to perhaps be something less wild. Maybe a Lincoln Continental that is old and questionable, but still road safe. So a pair of pants and a shirt and socks - Will is going to wear them. 

Will’s phone is an ominous square of black on the counter, still off and quiet the way that a loaded gun just casually sitting on a bedside table is. There’s an anticipatory energy about it, where text messages and accusatory staff emails are waiting to light up the screen. He leaves it where it sits, and pockets his wallet instead. But if there’s anything on the phone from Jack Crawford, it’s bound to still find him. The very idea makes him want to crawl under the house or run down the street. So maybe going outside his usual haunts is a better idea. 

Conventional wisdom says to hide in plain sight. While Will would find it appropriate to have hidden in his own office at Quantico, readily available to anyone who might recognize where he belongs as opposed to at crime scenes he is questionably cleared for, he doesn’t really want to see the bland 70s wood paneling of his office walls, or rush past Tracy’s desk where her glowing standard of self-care makes Will feel like he’s fucking up even this one sick day. 

“Just passing through!” he’d cheerfully wave. “Turns out my idea of a mental health day is a standard routine in my office! Please redirect all students, U.S. Marshalls, psychiatrists, and the head of the BAU if they come by - I have assessed they are all abnormal occurrences, and don’t jive with my flow.” Tracy would nod, this all sounding very logical, and offer a bag of Earl Grey to keep him company. Not _her_ company, because that too is not a thing Will Graham does on a standard day, human interaction intolerable to him, but warm beverages and unspoken agreements to ignore each other down the hall are perfectly acceptable.

He’s not going to the office, but he’s going somewhere. What do normal grown people with a day off do that’s not clean the house and passively wait to die alone because they’re a hateful bastard? 

Fishing is out at the moment. Fishing feels like sitting with Abigail Hobbes and feeling out the edges of where the dark in his mind begins. Fly-tying, a personal tedious favorite, is also out - all his supplies are sitting in the dark somewhere of an evidence locker, waiting to be cleared since despite it not being _Will’s_ kill trophies that are made with them, they are still _someone’s._

It’s been a while since he’s been to a museum he supposes, the vast number of them between Arlington and the coast making it hard to not hit one if he threw a dart at a map. He liked D.C. a lot when working on his master’s at George Washington University, the long green of the National Mall and its grand Traditional and Art Deco stone buildings standing with a permanence that he doesn’t feel in himself. It’s a little close to the FBI Headquarters for comfort, but with the way that Jack cloisters himself in his own office or spends his days hounding suspects and informational contacts separate of Will’s interactions with him, the likelihood of running into Will even accidentally is phenomenally low. He’ll just have to avoid leaving the line of Madison Drive. Or theatrically murdering someone.

Good mental health, Will repeats to himself. 

Will could use some culture, some more data points to recall when he thinks about people, and how their minds are horrible and beautiful in flesh and in art mediums alike. It’s the kind of lesson Hannibal likes to teach, but Will prefers to editorialize this bit himself. He’s known about how he feels for people for years, drawn that reference long before the other man tried to paint on top of it. 

Worst case scenario, he can go over to the Smithsonian and look at the bug collection wall, just like the old days. Rows and rows of specimens, each titled, unique, and lovely, made uncomplicated by their death and indexing. 

\--- 

Predictably, driving into D.C. is a regrettable decision, but today Will is resolved to feeling at least a smidgen of regret for everything, so the freedom to come and go as he pleases without having to tangle with the Metro system seems like a fair trade. The phone doesn’t come with him, but instead continues to look like some unfortunate portent of Things To Come. He feels its absence like a splinter the further from the house he gets until at last a tether is snapped, and it’s too far way to come back for. 

( _An uncomfortable truth: things must be too late to fix for you to let them go. You will keep the parts in a drawer with the promise you’ll repair them otherwise. You keep your optimism in there with them._ ) 

It’s a drizzly, grey day the closer he gets to the Potomac River and the coast, where the marine layer has never properly retreated and is cold with spitting rain. The snow is wet, dirty, and icy at the sides of the road. That suits him just fine. Less people to contend with, and more room to expand into rather than shrink away from. He hates feeling the need to explain himself.

As testament to this and barely out of the parking garage where the patchy winter grass expands into the National Mall, he buys a hot dog with mustard and ketchup, because he’s hungry and his hands are cold and he has time. It’s watery, lukewarm, and probably a couple days old, but he’s not accountable for his tastes today and it sounded good, even if it is heinously expensive for what it is. 

He eats in the bad weather, leaning on a pillar at the eastern terminus of the park with a couple of pigeons for company, serious looking interns and the occasional soggy tourist passing him by or asking him to help them take a picture. ( _You do - help them take a picture. It’s the nice thing to do, and your hands will be busy that way, now that your disgusting hot dog is gone._ ) The reflecting pool before the Congress building is more of a chorus of concentric rings in the rainfall, vibrating on its surface. When he looks westward to the spire of the Washington Monument, it’s a white knife against the hazy sky. 

The scene is less satisfying than he hoped - the hot dog is sitting wrong in his stomach. Not a great start to the day trip, but he guesses it’s better than hiding in bed, not sleeping, and actively failing to even please himself.

The angular progression of glass and concrete of the National Gallery of Art’s east expansion catches his eye, darkened by the wet weather and looking sepulchural and alien. It’s not so much that he _wants_ to go to look at modern and contemporary art, but there’s a rightness to the building that it is curveless and structured to contain rather than invite warmly in. No marble pillars, or burbling fountains inside, just an atrium of green trees that would be at home in a cemetery. Death, apparently and unintentionally for no one but Will, is the best mindset for minimalist works as well as rows of bugs. That seems fair.

There’s no admission fee, one of the few free things he’s entitled to as a citizen, though there is a ticket office to ensure that he’s not overcrowding the place. A young woman with a tasteful chopped bob and a perky smile assures him he’s good to go.

“Light day for foot traffic, so I have a few options left for entry right now!” she says, and tears a ticket stub to pass him with a map and brochure. “You’re lucky to be here today - nothing but middle schoolers as far as the eye can see tomorrow. Fridays are the worst!”

Fridays, when he goes to his not-therapy-only-conversations at Hannibal’s office, truly are. He smiles and nods, a little sardonic. “Of course,” he repeats, “the absolute worst. You know how those middle schoolers drag down the rest of us, trying to navel gaze in front of Pollock paintings in good old fashioned adult solitude.” 

Her perky smile does something weird, but she keeps it on like a champ. Will feels guilty, and slides away to the main atrium in the bright footstep of the windowed walls. He breathes through his nose in measured intakes and releases, self-conscious with shame. 

The continuation of this exchange goes something like this is Will’s head: 

“Please don’t stay too long!” she could say. “Our country’s finest and least accessible works of art aren’t designed for your miserable scrutiny! Taxpayer money is laundered into the promise of an idea that’s beyond your cynicism and above the layman’s actual appreciation, but we’re not supposed to say that part out loud - all the plaques are made up. All the explanations are manufactured afterwards. Everything is without meaning, and you’re welcome to fabricate one for yourself and generously donate to our foundation program!” 

“Of course!” Will could reply. “I’m here to waste additional taxpayer money as a government employee on an unannounced day off because I think the judicial system has broken my ability to enjoy things! I haven’t slept well in weeks, there’s no joy or motivation other than spite that keeps me alive, and everyone that I used to think thought well of me has either seen fit to sleep with each other, work against my best interests, or do both and act like they did neither! Also, explaining motivation to acts of violence by animals are now apparently on my honey-do list, despite it being wildly outside my expertise. Can’t wait to see the Jasper Johns encaustics about patriotism, and please send me an invite for the annual gala that I will irrespectably decline either because it’s stupid or because I’m dead!” 

Will crushes the brochure a bit in a fist.

But he shakes it off. He stares into the canopy of a ground level tree in the atrium, eyes dancing over the tops of visitors’ heads to avoid their faces, before he takes the stairs instead of the escalator. The cardio will do him some good. A moment alone to struggle will do him better. 

( _Another uncomfortable truth: that person isn’t thinking bad things about you. That person wouldn’t have even noticed you except to give you the brochure and let you know about the exhibits. You’re another nameless asshole in a series - how’s that for normalcy?_ ) 

\---

Barnett Newman’s “Stations of the Cross” are a progression of vertical white, beige and black lines on enormous canvases. It’s the sort of thing that Will likes to look at with his blue-collar upbringing and say it’s pretentious, or self-congratulatory. Even when he looks at it with the scope of his empathy, his disdain is invariably transposed on top of the mark making of brush and paint and rasping linen. He can’t honestly say that he takes any deeper meaning out of it, only that he feels like he’s deliberately missing the point. 

The point, in theory, is suffering. The Stations are snapshots into painful moments for Christ. The Via Dolorosa is filled with pitfalls and stonethrowers, and the path to Calvary is stained with watery blood. Will thinks he knows what that’s like, but it also seems arrogant to suggest it. Crucifixion comes with majesty. He is simply a sad man maligned by another one. 

Really, he should head into the main hall of the National Gallery and call to mind the portrait frozen heads of women and men, a thousand times more comfortable in their mute stillness. There’s no need to contemplate those - they reach out in time to say they existed, and they do it without causing harm.

But it’s a Thursday after lunch, and the room is pleasantly warm with no one to crowd him, so it’s as quiet a space as he’s going to be afforded. It gives him time to decide how best to waste the day next. The hum of tourists and the guides is white noise in the hall next door where they coo and click camera shutters for Rothko in fuzzy fields of color. The cold white light from the harlequined frosted glass above brings cloudy winter sunlight on his shoulders, and he can sit on the bench and be left to himself and drift between the lines of colorless oil. 

The beige of the untreated parts of the canvases soak him up, and he is on the walls, safely behind the bars for the first time in several weeks. 

\---

The universe, in and of itself, is remorseless. It also has a remorseless sense of humor, which is the only acceptable answer as to how he is able to fade from the clean whiteness of the gallery into a peaceful state, and back again to Hannibal Lecter standing at his 12’o’clock before the “Eighth Station”. 

( _You laugh - always with his symmetries and symbolism, across multiple disciplines. Halfway down in the progression of Christ’s persecution. The number of gates to Heaven in Islam. At the end of suffering in Buddhism, although Hannibal is less of a priest’s eightfold path and more of a physicist’s eightfold way - stable against nuclear forces, adaptable to things weaker than himself. You kind of hate him for it as much as you admire it._ )

To Hannibal’s credit, he doesn’t come so close as to make Will uncomfortable. It’s probably only the irony of the moment that Will sees him there at all, his periphery finally piecing together the black coat thrown over the man’s arm, revealing the navy underpinned with grey and black plaid of a suit that Will thinks he’s seen before, one he saves for cold days like today. Hannibal is hardly the type to skip the fullness of the exhibit just to be spotted in center field, even if he is dramatic and often impractical. 

Will also knows that he is only in here because Hannibal has spotted Will before he spots Hannibal, like a lion revealing their position out of disinterest in the prey. Maybe some other Thursday he’ll give proper chase, and just like the first time Hannibal does it, Will’s not convinced he’ll see it coming. 

Will shakes his head. 

“Do you also find yourself without a schedule on a random weekday, and it’s just a happy coincidence that you’re about 40 miles southwest of your usual latitudes?” he asks in the solemn quiet of the room, blinking against the brightness of the skylight. “One would think you’d call your girlfriend to keep you company.”

Hannibal turns, and from here he is a sharp zip of color on the canvas himself, both trim in profile and solid in a way that Will often feels he shouldn’t be. ( _“He is smoke,” says Abel, and you suck his air down, grateful for the burn of it the way you’re grateful for a cigarette or a shot of whiskey. Harms delivered in small increments._ ) 

Hannibal doesn’t try to pretend he’s shocked or startled. His caramel-gold square of a handkerchief is a riot in the colorless voids of the room, praline warm. 

“I was _with_ an agenda today,” Hannibal replies with a smile, eyes tracking Will’s face as though he means to scry it. “I had a meeting with a patient at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and thought to take advantage of an afternoon cleared for travel for myself. The modernists of the East Gallery make for good rainy day contemplation. You, however,” he adds with a pivot to walk towards the bench, “are an unexpected surprise and delight.”

And he is - delighted. It surprises Will every time that Hannibal likes him, because no one else really does, but Hannibal is also a literal cannibal and murderer, so not quite the recommendation of character he’s hoping for. Will gives a quiet snort, eyes darting to the First Station on his left, near the room’s entrance. ( _Condemnation to death._ ) 

“About 40 miles outside your _own_ longitudes, are you not?” asks Hannibal, having a seat next to him, cutting the path of his view to the painting. “You strike me as hiding rather than taking in the scenery.” 

With a shrug, Will smiles as well. “Having myself a little impromptu time off that’s not mandated by my incarceration for once. Decided to take in some old favorites and recalibrate,” he stops to roll that over, elbows against his knees. “Murder gets old.” 

Hannibal pans the room with his eyes. “And yet you are sitting in contemplation of a gallery full of the torture and murder of Christ, are you not? Is that an old favorite?” 

“Doesn’t look like it, for what that’s worth,” Will laughs irritably, pushing his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose and looking away from Hannibal and to the wood floor below. “I guess I don’t know what else to rest my eyes on anymore.”

( _Close them. Try to sleep and drift downwards. Be heavy._ )

He can feel Hannibal’s eyes on him, with his sharp tracery of a gaze that cuts like it wants to lift the skin and see the fine creases of where his muscle twitches, or further in still to where teeth meet alveolar margins. ( _Where does your taste for meat start? He wants so badly to know._ ) For someone who’s observations are so pointed, that he can’t feel Will’s simmering frustration with him is remarkable. 

Or maybe he just ignores it. He wants to be Will’s friend. Will, against better reason, feels that in himself like a stone falling and echoing up a canyon. It’s carven somewhere in him, further down but ever present. Maybe that’s why Hannibal must continuously lift the skin and open old wounds. He can still hear it, the stone rattling down to the bottom.

Will shakes his head again, and looks back up to the “Eight Station”, two thick vertical black lines offset from the center, and the empty canvas between. He focuses on that, and speaks without really thinking about it. 

“What do you recommend?” asks Will, surprised to ask. 

“For something to contemplate that is, or _isn’t_ murder?” answers Hannibal, unsurprised, never missing a beat. 

This gets a proper dry laugh this time from Will. “I don’t think you actually separate the two. The National Gallery seems like the kind of place you start finding ways to piece them together,” Will says, shuffling to stand. The room feels a little crooked, as though he woke on the wrong side of the bed. He guesses he’s sort of been sleeping with his eyes open, if becoming absent and still is that.

Hannibal taps the side of his nose, like he has a secret to share. “A pattern repeats. Once you recognize one, it’s hard to not notice it anymore.” His face is inscrutable, but his eyes are as vivid as the pocket square. “You have yours, and I have mine. I saw one recently that I wanted to reexamine,” he adds. 

“With your patient at the Natural History museum?” Will asks.

Hannibal’s stare remains pointed. “A place I see patterns most often,” he says. 

Will nods slow, suspicious, but reluctantly ok to shelve that for now. “I’m probably on my way over there myself. It was my failsafe for the day anyway.”

“Wanting to check over my work?” Hannibal asks, and tilts his head, mulling over that. “I’m not opposed to returning. It’s a pleasure to see what you pick from thin air.”

“Not here for you, or the mind games, or the cases today,” Will replies with a glance back up into the grid of the skylight above. “Rather defeats the purpose of indulging myself if I’m actually indulging you. You could have left a full-ass set of bodies like a damn recreation of Washington crossing the Delaware, and I’m not looking at it. It’s my _mental health day_.” 

Maybe if he says it enough times, it will be conferred on him. _Behold, one mental health, unused and unsoiled!_ The thought must shine through when he speaks - he can’t see it, but he feels Hannibal’s smile grow teeth, actually amused now and not just holding court. 

“An admirable holiday to take. Then I shall strive to help you in your endeavor,” says Hannibal. 

_By leaving abruptly?_ is his first thought. When Will looks down with every intention to tell him to fuck off, he’s the problem, he’s the reason his house is a surgery theater, he’s the reason he can’t fall back into mediocrity like the rest of the middle class working professionals of the D.C. metropolitan area, Will’s disarmed by the soft look across Hannibal’s face, like he’s proud. 

It startles him, how good that feels. He has to jumpstart his voice by clearing his throat. It’s so obvious that he wants to tear out of the room, or crawl under the bench. ( _Only halfway - it’s not hiding if it’s only halfway._ ) “You have a terrible track record,” he huffs. “And I can take care of myself.” 

“I wouldn’t think as much of you if you couldn’t,” Hannibal says, and that too is a strange comfort. “But my apologies, Will, never mind me,” he adds, waving a hand above his knee, still sitting. “How does Will Graham indulge himself on a Thursday afternoon before dinner but after lunch in the District of Columbia? Do you burn down the J. Edgar Hoover Building? Rescue the strays of Lincoln Park? Perhaps fish the waters of the Anacostia?” 

( _You could do all those things, but no. Today’s a day for Will Graham, and you want things that no one else is suggesting you should do or should want. You could take him next door, and explain how beetle wings are used in fly-tying and determining body decomposition in equal measure. You could just drink your way down the road, look as sorry as you should be tomorrow for being an irresponsible fuck-up but feel good for a couple of hours. More pressing than that, you could kill him, but you don’t know if you want that either. You could stand over him, your hands on him and his on your face where you know they will be warm and you are unaccountably sad that he could die and that you will still be what you are so he’ll wipe your cheek and-)_

Will sighs, and looks away, swallowing around a tight mouth and eyes. 

“Nothing crazy, not today anyway. I’d like to look at tidy rows of things behind glass,” Will says after some length. “Preferably not me and other mental deficients. Preferably not my co-workers either. I was hoping more for insects, like a Golden Tortoise Beetle, or a Silver-Banded Hairstreak. Probably a drink later, because I’m in the area, and I hear that’s something that well-adjusted social people do, not just with their psychiatrists.” 

“All that glistens is not gold?” asks Hannibal fondly. “I solemnly swear to leave all the contemplations of forensic psychiatry and self-actualization at the doorway, if that will make you better inclined to company.” 

“Sometimes a bug is just a bug,” Will returns with a shrug, and rises to leave. “Yeah,” he adds a little tightly. “Yeah, I guess we could try something different.”

Hannibal nods, satisfied. Excited even, if Will dares apply that to someone who deals in emotions as ambient composers do in song progression. Slow. Subtle. Not for everyone. 

At the exit, the final addition to The Stations is isolated, ushering them out. A coda, with a line of red on the left edge of the canvas unlike the monotony of the others. ( _There with Christ: resurrection._ ) Will stops to look at it and only moves on when Hannibal is far enough down the hall that he has to pick up the pace to catch up. 

It’s nice to have company. 

It’s probably stupid of him, but listening to the other man make sly comments at the outrageous price of the blue rooster statue, the excessive number of mobiles, and a very self-congratulatory board of recent acquisitions that are apparently _not_ on display to the public, he feels a little less lonely and more held upright and present. Grounded, not in the ground. 

It feels like something he shouldn’t do.

( _What would Jack think? Or Alana? You skipped out on responsibility to...what, go on a field trip with Hannibal Lecter? Is that allowed? Do you explode into flames if someone finds out? Fuck it, you guess it’s what you’re deciding to do anyway. So much for not being a flaming bus of a human being, right?_ )

\---

It’s a walk, but not a long walk to the Smithsonian, ten minutes of light rain, clogged street drains, and contemplation of the heel-toe heel-toe of walking next to Hannibal.

Will’s surprised to see he’s not a casual walker, the kind of man with somewhere to be and the good health to quickly get there. He doesn’t know why he thought Hannibal would be a dawdler, but they don’t often have much excuse to see each other in settings outside of the office and crime scenes - they don’t have the kind of relationships that necessitates coffee dates, or catching up on the weekends, or mutual events that they’ll run into each other, or power walk between museums.

Why didn’t they? Before all the sickness, and upset, and snide comments from either side of the prison bars. Will knows Hannibal wants to be his friend, so why did they never try in the usual ways? Is his value to Hannibal only as far as his empathy for the grotesque can stretch? ( _Is there nothing inside you or inside him that has a need of basic material and emotional nourishments?_ )

“Penny for your thoughts,” Hannibal says, weaving past others idling on the sidewalks, undisturbed with a fine black umbrella above himself. 

“Not worth that much, really,” says Will. 

“Worth substantially more, but never turn down an opportunity to bargain,” Hannibal says with his usual upturned mouth. 

When he stretches his mind towards it, really tries the way that he’s often afraid to do where the other man is involved, Will knows that Hannibal was pleased to have found him by no design of his own. Random acts of serendipity are as welcome as random acts of malice, a god of chaos enjoying the firing of synapses of light before it’s all gone. A trip to the museum is no better or no worse than idling over the senseless corpse of the truck driver on top of the semi. Hannibal simply accepts it, and fashions the moment to his preference. 

He envies it. Just the act of walking down the street with Hannibal feels taboo, like people are watching from the windows, accusing, not understanding. Alana is likely teaching classes at George Washington University right now, and Will is stomping over furrows of icy water with the man she thinks she loves, and Will knows full well feels nothing for her in return. 

( _What does that mean for you?_ )

\---

Will is hugely disappointed to hear the insect collection is archived.

“Oh gosh, they probably put that away like five years ago,” says a docent, a pleasant older gentleman that has a bowtie on his blue shirt. Will wonders how he can get his job, and just tell people what they’re looking for is in another castle, perhaps literally across the way at the Smithsonian Castle. “Not a lot of interest, hard to keep people from touching the glass.”

He puts on a brave face, because Hannibal is there, and Hannibal doesn’t really need to know the number of hours he spent as a graduate student in the darkness of a rounded progression of pinned bugs, taking in their colors and shapes. He doesn’t need to know Will didn’t associate much with his fellow researchers, but Will was happy to associate with the research. It’s too close to the present day and his relationship with work - Will feels unevolved and self-conscious at the idea of it, and that’s not really what this particular Thursday afternoon is about. 

So when Will stares blankly at the museum map for a whole 20 seconds in quiet, reeling contemplation, wondering if the same staff is in charge of the insect archive as when he practically lived in it, and might be inclined to just let him slip in without an appointment, Hannibal is unusually kind in taking him to the second floor to the Mineral Collection, where it is humid, and relatively empty and full of shining stones that call to mind beetle shells if not the beetles themselves.

“Alas, the need to cycle things in for an easily distracted audience,” Hannibal sighs, and directs them to meteorites with glistening quartz and moldavite. “Fortunately, elements are slow to transform, and I’ve never met a member of the general population that was unappreciative of something large and shiny, so this remains.” 

“You don’t have to coddle me,” Will says at last. “I wanted bugs, and I’m getting geology.” 

Hannibal’s face goes from placating to outright amused, eyes glinting in the low lights of the exhibit. “Come now Will, don’t you want to know how caves are formed? I hear all the little boys are all aflutter at the idea of stalactites. Philosophers too, if you want to really go for the more mature approach.”

Will presses up close to a cross section of basalt flow behind glass. “If we’re about to have Plato’s allegory of the cave as the subject of the next hour as my consolation prize for the bugs going back into the vaults, I swear to god, I will have myself arrested to escape your company and thank the officer for doing it.”

“That fond of incarceration, Will?” 

( _Always that assumption of guilt in the cruiser over the radio, that need for convicts to get back in because outside is too vast. It doesn’t matter that you weren’t the perpetrator at the end of the day - you were still the inmate._ )

Will’s mouth opens and closes, opens and closes. 

It’s worse because Hannibal clearly sees it, and it feels foolish to think he’d be merciful twice in the same day.

Will finds himself considering a display of basalt pillars in the middle of the room, the even columns in rises and falls like waves comforting as a tingling numbness is taking over his lips, and hands, and all the organs hiding inside of him, vulnerable and red-purple with blood. There’s not really any pretending that he’s reading the plaque in front of them - he probably knows more about basalt pillars than the fifth grade reading level version is going to provide, but it’s better than explaining himself to Hannibal, who has the good grace to not continue to joke about it. He’s just about resolved to turn and tell the other man to kindly fuck off and let him mope about his bugs, and his life, and that he is not the same person coming out of BSHCI that he was going in, and not just because of the encephalitis or the loss of trust in people and himself as a functional person, though that’s certainly having a bigger impact than he’s given it credit for.

Will doesn’t make it that far before Hannibal’s hand is on his shoulder, his mouth up to Will’s ear, charitably behind him but far enough away that anyone passing through wouldn’t suspect that the hand is grounding, and the warmth of it goes directly to the pit of his stomach where it churns in anticipation. 

He smells of vetiver and cardamom. It’s strange to be aware of it, and strange to think it’s good, but it is. 

“A poorly made joke,” Hannibal says slowly, his baritone coming softly in the dark, looking forward into the pillars with Will. Perhaps their vision meets in some invisible point amongst them. “Your life was difficult before Jack Crawford and Garrett Jacob Hobbs. I am sure you find it more so now coming from making no decisions to making several essential ones. If I may suggest something?” 

“Is it another three month stint in prison to see if the first round was as good as I remember it? If I recall correctly, and I do, most of that sea change is thanks to you,” he tersely replies, deflecting. 

He turns, craning his neck to look around the bend of the exhibit hall, thousands of years of stone no more than grey rocks to him to pass through right now. “Isn’t the Hope Diamond in here somewhere? Can we find another cursed object to focus on other than you and me? Maybe take my chances with the skeletal remains of a red deer downstairs, or admit that this might have been a bad idea and that we behave better within the confines of sessions and crime scenes?” 

But Hannibal continues on, hand on Will’s shoulder staying put, thumb hooking softly into the space under his collarbone where it meets his arm. It fits nicely. “I want to grant you permission to enjoy the rest of your day. Anything at all. You decide what’s next, and I give you a hall pass, no questions asked and never mentioned again if you’d like.”

Will stops, head jerking back to the side. 

“What?” he asks. “What the fuck do you think that’ll achieve? I can do what I want without being told it’s okay, but thanks, _Doctor Lecter_.” 

“Will.” Hannibal’s face in the gloom of the hall is difficult to read. “This is a bid for normalcy - trawling around old places that you enjoyed before, avoiding your house, not actually taking what you need. Do you consider that treating yourself? It’s a step further than kissing someone to change the subject.”

( _That’s true, and no. You’d rather hamstring yourself than say so out loud._ ) 

“You can do better, and as you like to do these days, you can blame what happens next on me,” Hannibal adds with a contemplative tilt. “Maybe you’ll be more inclined to do what you want. I suggested burning down the FBI Department Building at the gallery, but perhaps let’s skip that one for now - not enough accelerants on hand on such short notice. I’m also not inclined to confessions and arrest warrants - it’s a weeknight after all,” and to that he winks like it’s cute, as though he didn’t set Will up for much the same not so long ago, and that Will has been half-heartedly doing to Hannibal since he got free of the prison’s doors. 

“I mean I could just kill you,” Will says like it’s the first time it’s occurred to him. “What then? That seems like the logical solution to finding happiness.”

Hannibal rolls a shoulder. On him it is less petulant, and more of a sine wave, sweeping a field with calculation. “I don’t think this is about doing what makes you happy as much as it is doing things that you choose.” There’s a ponderous seriousness in his face. “But as long as you meant it - I’m all in for honest acts of aggression.” 

Will’s not sure he means anything honestly right now. He’s exhausted trying to act like he does. 

“I...really just want a drink right now,” he says instead. 

( _There’s nothing you want more than to just...not be what you were last night._ )

Hannibal nods, yes, anything he says. There’s no problem that hasn’t been solved at the bottom of a bottle if he works at it long enough. Worst case scenario he falls asleep, and Will is so tired. 

“I know just the place,” says Hannibal, whose hand goes from collarbone, to neck, to the tight curls that hide under his hair at the nape of his neck. Will would complain, but the hand is gone before it’s worth mentioning, and it felt good.

Permission. He has permission today to think that. 

\---

“Just the place” is a speakeasy with a very generous whiskey selection and not a lot of fuss. Will is relieved to be let out of the cab in a very normal segment of downtown, where a block of very normal condos houses a very obvious basement where a bar is beneath it. There are lots of mirrors inside, but none that he directly faces from his position at the bar, the only one within his sight obscured by rows and rows of low-lit bottles. There are no extraneous antlers, memento mori, or poor lighting situations that befit murder in a back alley of an urban area. The analyst in Will is ok with this. It’s something that would be at home in his old police beat.

Hannibal orders and has an Old Fashioned cocktail set in front of him with little fanfare.

“Á la vôtre, Will,” Hannibal says, a shimmering coupe in his own hand, lemon twist and something bubbling inside. The glasses clink, and Will is not shy to drink too fast. It’s a strong drink, but it’s good. 

“Laissez les bons temps rouler,” Will croaks around the burn of bourbon. “Don’t ask for more than that, by the way. Daddy didn’t teach me much Cajun growing up since we moved too often for it to be useful, and it’s practically the slogan of Mardi Gras.”

“Mardi Gras would be a good source of inspiration,” Hannibal says with an extra click of his teeth on glass, taking a moment to taste his drink, seemingly satisfied. “Best to get it all out now, though it would be a shame for you to follow the metaphor through and give something up for lent.” 

“Right,” Will snorts. “I am giving up museums. I had a good run without them, and one day of getting back into the habit has been both enlightening and awful. Consider the typical clientele,” he grouses, and Hannibal actually laughs at that. 

Hannibal takes another sip of his drink. “Surely not so bad as all that,” he says. Will has a hard time looking away from the pointed tooth catching Hannibal’s thin upper lip, as normal and imperfect as any other man. It’s always a surprise to see the facade’s edges. “Though I can certainly understand the compulsion to go on your own time and without others. Truly, it’s only the world’s sense of irony working against you today, though perhaps if you frowned less tragically, and didn’t wear your typical plaid fare, you wouldn’t have been spotted. I didn’t come with the intention to find you, nor did I expect it.” 

“ _There’s_ the jab at my wardrobe I was waiting for,” Will says with a tip of his glass towards the bar wall, and another burning sip, rolling it around under his tongue with the maraschino cherry from the bottom of the glass. 

A sigh to his left. “Garnish first, Will?”

Will laughs. “What, you’re not going to give me permission for that?” It feels strange to say it out loud, like he’s challenging Hannibal to take it back. 

Hannibal smiles, and cracks his neck in a smooth roll of his own. 

“You saw me,” Will starts to puzzle out, still considering the cherry in his mouth, “before The Stations. Probably outside on the green with the hot dog. I doubt I was zoning out long enough for you to find me in a multi-storied, multi-chambered museum accidentally.” 

“Not so far away as all that, and I would have been morally obligated to keep you from eating overpriced street cart food, day of self-care or not,” Hannibal says with a half-smile, turning his own coupe glass in precise 90 degree rotations. The bubbles jostle themselves from the side of the glass with each movement, a bit like the ticking of a second hand on a watch. “No, I simply saw you in the atrium, idling near the windows at the entrance. You cut a very distinct if a little dazed figure, watching crowds, keeping carefully blank.” 

“Did you catch my completely unnecessary hostility with the ticket attendant too, or have I at least been spared that?” Will asks, favoring the wound in the cherry where the pit has been removed with his tooth, but still not chewing. 

Hannibal takes a sip of his drink, but shakes his head as he meets Will’s eyes with a grin. “Unnecessary hostility is a part of your charm, Will. I’d hardly know what to do if we didn’t spar at the start of every conversation.”

“Drink and run through some lightweight Francophone phrases, if we use today as a point of reference,” Will retorts. “Very useful so far - you’ve gotten at least one anecdote about my father out of me, and two admissions of feeling self-conscious. Imagine how successful therapy would have been if you told me things in languages I don’t understand while awake, instead of in English while I’m out of my mind.” 

There’s an uncomfortable pause there, mostly on Will’s part. Hannibal seems to mull that over for the bonus admission that it is. 

“That’s not blanket permission to use a new method of subliminal positive reinforcement for murder, but the way,” Will adds, as though he’s ever been able to head Hannibal off at the pass. He chews the maraschino, and swallows, where it feels like a stone in his throat. 

“No indeed,” says Hannibal, flicking condensation from the stem of his glass off his finger in such casual energy that it catches Will’s eye far more than Hannibal’s reliably peaceful face. An anxious tic, an admission of his own, something normally betrayed in pen scratches and fine articulations of a knife. “I’d much prefer it all be directly positively reinforced at this juncture. You and I are beyond gentle suggestions, aren’t we, Will?”

“If what happened before was a gentle suggestion, I hesitate to know what the obvious pushes are.” 

Hannibal gives him a toothy grin. “If it’s obvious, I have every faith that you’ll know when you see it.” 

Will clears his drink with that, faster than he should, and contemplates a second. Hannibal has another one for him before he can think twice about the drive back into Virginia, or how quickly the first went, or if Hannibal understood that he was going to discipline himself out of it, and how unfair it is that he’s so good at reading him when it often feels he can’t read Hannibal at all.

“Cheers to unsubtle desires,” says Hannibal, who sounds gravelly and looks away in a rare show of conflict when Will refuses to make eye contact.

But Will really can’t right now. Will feels the shivering hot of his hands again in memory, gasping around the force of plastic in his throat and the comfort of being held. He knows that thought is in his face, which is prickly and growing warm with alcohol and a rush of need that he doesn’t feel like explaining, and doesn’t think he could bear being told that he’s allowed to have. It’s a fucked up thing. 

( _You can. You can’t. It makes you sad to never know what to do next. You’re not without clear cut decisions - they’re just all bad ones._ ) 

\---

They move on to safer things eventually, despite themselves and the things that are easiest for them to fall into the habit of discussing. Hannibal talks about his first years in Baltimore, how taking the Metro to D.C. was a place to sink into between shifts at Johns Hopkins, far enough away to leave work behind, close enough to still have time to rest. Will talks about his days as a researcher, how he rested on the green of the National Mall between classes, how there was another visiting scholar in the Smithsonian’s collection that studied cicadas that Will at some point thought he had a crush on.

( _“She had coke-bottle glasses, a Tennessee accent, an appreciation for transparent chitins and wing interference patterns, and called me ‘hun’,” you smile. “I fancied myself in love.” Hannibal tells you that he doesn’t know many relationships predicated on exoskeletal iridescence, but that he’s charmed that you consider it a good foundation, and one can’t discard people by merit of unfortunate glasses. “Mutual interests are important,” he teases, and you glow, wanting to hide behind the plastic of your own glasses frames._ ) 

Four drinks in for Will and a modest two for Hannibal, they return by cab to the National Mall itself, which is yellow-orange with the sodium lights on the street, water skipping along the fountains and reflecting pool once more. It’s cold and misty outside, and Will doesn’t have much on him to cut the chill, but they walk all the same down the lengths of lawn. Will wants to sober up, but he’s probably taking a nap on a library bench at the rate things are going, and doesn’t want to admit to it.

“What next?” asks Hannibal. Will gets caught in the gleam of the tiny beads of drizzling rain sitting on the shoulders of Hannibal’s pea coat instead of Hannibal’s face, which is earnest and thoughtful again. They are white and orange and black in the dark of the city night, and he wants to wipe them away, but doesn’t know if he’s allowed to touch them. 

He almost does, hand raising at his side before Hannibal’s brows raise slightly and the self-consciousness comes roaring back. He’s so drunk - he needs to go the fuck home, is what he needs to do. 

“Probably three bottles of water and a headache in the morning,” he gruffly replies. “I should get back to take care of the dogs.” 

“That doesn’t sound like something to want,” Hannibal admonishes him. “You have,” and to this he looks at a wristwatch, hidden in the cuffs of his sleeves, “three and a half hours of your day left to fill. I am at your service,” he adds with a smile.

Will thinks about it for a moment. “I do want to take care of the dogs,” he says seriously. “I’m gonna have an interesting drive trying to do it though.”

The other man starts shaking his head before Will’s even done. “Nonsense, you’re much too inebriated for that. Let me drive you there,” Hannibal suggests instead. “Tell yourself I gave you the drinks, and I get the punishment for it. A late night cab ride is no great burden for me - I wasn’t in my own car today to begin with.”

Having Hannibal in his house feels like a bad idea and a loaded opportunity. What it’s loaded with is a question he doesn’t really know the answer to, though the quiet of the car cabin, where he can put his head to the window and drift doesn’t sound so terrible. It’ll be as it was when he’s driven home from the stables, hands still shaking with the force of his need to shoot Clark Ingram. That’s a feeling he could use a second taste of. 

“I guess your gluttony doesn’t stop at food,” Will sighs. He throws over the keys to the Volvo, and Hannibal’s hand snaps up, delighted with his catch. The droplets on his coat dance off, no longer there to be brushed away. 

\---

Will doesn’t think he’ll ever forgive the dogs for how well that they took to Hannibal. It’s frustrating to consider the hours poured over training them, conditioning them to soft touches and soft words when some would bite or run away, and this...caricature of a person, barely holding the seams of his costume together now that Will can see it, can open the door to his car and his house and be greeted with the fanfare of a visiting king. 

Dogs truly are guided by their hungers. Will guesses Hannibal relates. 

“Just how much did you feed them when you visited?” asks Will, bleary and still a bit unsteady on his feet. 

( _The car ride isn’t terrible - you listen to the engine, and the occasional bumps of the roadway markers, and the ping of gravel on the body of the vehicle and breathe to it. The heater is on too high because you are wet from the rain in places. You don’t quite get sick, though it’s a near thing. You don’t quite sleep, but Hannibal’s hand on the manual shifter of the car is too like Hannibal’s hand on your arm or your knee, close enough to grab._ ) 

( _You know it feels nice. You shouldn’t ask for it to switch from the gear knob to your leg, to your shoulder again, to your neck. He would do it and you’d be left holding the bill._ ) 

Will clears his throat, and doesn’t close the storm door behind him, house left exposed to the damp night outside while the dogs mill around in the snow and slush. 

“As much as I thought they should have,” Hannibal says, stroking Harley and Max’s heads with a refined pass of his palms. He pays the tips of their ears special attention, where the fur is softest. “Dogs are grateful audiences, require very little performance, and are constantly keen for the same sleights of hand.”

“Sounds like the average person,” says Will, heading into the kitchen to find his own bottle of whiskey, because he can. When he raises it in question, Hannibal sighs with a smile and nods. Two glasses poured, one permitted, the other to be held to humor him - Will doesn’t pretend he’ll drink it, but it’s less weird to not be five drinks in while someone watches on the sidelines. “Most people aren’t very complicated. They enjoy structure, though not necessarily elaborate ones. But I guess that’s more your expertise.” 

“ _You_ enjoy structure,” Hannibal replies, taking the proffered drink. “Or at least you rely on it to keep your impulses contained.”

This again. “Didn’t you promise no self-actualization talk in exchange to tag along today?” Will grouses, takes a long swallow of whiskey, and stands near the doorway.

“If you consider following impulses to be self-actualization,” Hannibal says coyly. The corner of his mouth could cut with its half-grin. It makes Will’s gut stir to look at it, how unselfishly it shares the way that Hannibal’s words usually don’t. 

Will tries to keep his face still, mouth going thin. “You do.” 

Hannibal has the good grace to sit on that for a moment before replying, looking at the scatter of light through his glass. “Impulse control makes us higher thinking animals than dogs, or perhaps our animal in the wings savaging people thoughtlessly. They can, so they do,” Hannibal replies, bending to greet another one of the dogs that comes forward to nose the shiny point of his shoes. “Following the impulses that reflect desires instead of mere instinct are what separates man from the rest of God’s creation.” 

“Shame was born with Adam on the sixth day,” Will adds.

Hannibal shakes his head, rising again and brushing a knee with his hand. “Shame was born after God rested and made for Adam a companion. Neither he nor Eve would have known it for what it was without God’s invention of it as an afterthought.”

Will laughs a little. “Don’t go growing trees of knowledge if you don’t want the house pets to eat the fallen fruit? Or is the shame supposed to be _healthy,_ and intentional, and we’re supposed to feel it?” 

That comes out more bitter than Will intends. Hannibal’s head turns to trace from Will’s glass to his mouth and up to his eyes. Will tries to hold it, and not think of what Hannibal sees. The moment crawls by before the other man speaks finally. 

“That you feel shame for small things is something I am learning as we go, by design of God or not. You’re not accustomed to indulging yourself,” Hannibal says, consideringly. “Rather beyond just the scope of violence. I had thought your conventional compass for judgment was at fault, but I don’t think it ends there.” He turns the glass in his hand. “You overthink what it says about you, and it steals your satisfaction.”

“What makes you so confident?” Will asks, trying to keep the anger out of his voice. 

“You used a sick day that you were entitled to with reluctance overcome only by exhaustion, and went to a museum and rested in a public empty space to avoid being caught doing so because no one would think to find you there. Then, grabbed a drink with a friend that you didn’t want to be treated to or treated by, and are now industriously shaming yourself out of whatever you want next, whatever it is. What conclusion would you prefer I take from that, Will?”

“All my options come with strings attached,” Will mutters, not quite daring to address the other things. Hannibal’s not wrong. Will would chalk it up to a working class background, the importance of meaningful employment, of surmounting his own failings and neuroticisms. There’s so many reasons to _not_ want to do the things Will wants to do. 

( _You can’t sleep. You’re paralyzed by trivialities like getting dressed, and eating, and making yourself feel good for a flickering second. You want to not be by yourself in your ugly thoughts. You want to be clever. You want to be likeable, and measured, and what you once thought was a good man. You don’t know if it’s justified to do what you want to do, because what Will Graham actually wants to do are things that undermine what you say you want to do out loud._ ) 

“Your actions often undermine your words,” Hannibal says, and bites the side of his lip. Will sees it - can’t look away from the spit-shine of it. Hannibal sees that too, and steps closer, where Will can feel the incandescent warmth of him, and neither gives ground to the other. “Your strings are from a reluctance to fully embrace one course of action over another. You are attracted to opportunities, and then the what-ifs start piling on. Drinking was an easy choice, something comfortable, done often - sharing something you _truly_ want is frightening. Isn’t that right?”

Will turns his head to stare down at the floor. He gasped for hours there, laboring to not cry, or fall through the world. He is still laboring not to cry, and it’s just easier to do when his feet are moving and his mouth is busy with being a smart ass, or a profiler, or whatever is left for him to be in the wreckage of his life that existed before Hobbs, and Jack, and Hannibal. He wants some semblance of control. He wants to be held and feel good again by whatever means possible, and he can’t do it for himself.

This is not the right person to ask for either, and he is bursting with the want to do so. 

Hannibal is merciful, and takes the lead one more time. He closes the gap between them, pushes his face past Will’s cheek to breath hot into his ear, hands around a glass or at his side.

“What do you want to do, Will?” asks Hannibal, more tongue than voice at the side of his head, the rumble of an engine instead of the smoothness of strings. “Truly want to do. It’s your day after all - you have permission.” 

Will laughs, throat tightening at the idea of honesty, eyes burning. What Will wants would shock him. It shocks Will, so why wouldn’t it shock Hannibal? It would be so good to push a surprise at Hannibal for once, and it’s humiliating to realize he is half-hard at the thought. 

( _He's holding your face, and your neck, and you're swallowing around the hardness of a tube while you're eyes water and it's ok as long as he's gentle, as long as-_ )

He chokes a bit on another humming laugh. “Something between sob and have my cock sucked, if we’re being perfectly honest, and which says way more about me and my feelings for you than our _conversations_ really account for.” 

It’s terrifying to put that in the air.

Hannibal, for all that he has every opportunity to twist this into a Freudian monstrosity, and mention Alana who Will tries to forget about, and manifest one of those sardonic not-smiles at him, takes that in with a nod, nose tickling the temple of Will’s head when he pulls away to check Will’s face, though there’s a sharpness to his eyes that normally is better tempered, like he keeps the flue of a great fire partially closed and the embers soft and hot enough to ignite, but not to flare up.

“Sex and outpourings of emotion share waters - which into which varies,” he whispers into the side of Will’s mouth. 

“Is that a glorified way of saying some people get upset and have sex to find equilibrium, and others have sex and cry in the middle of it as a coping mechanism?”

Hannibal huffs a little, the heat of his breath searing on Will’s chin and cheeks. “I am saying the two share harbors and that there’s nothing to be self-conscious about. Deltas are for dispersal, and much of nature thrives in them regardless if it’s into saltwater or tides flushing inwards. Sit down,” he adds firmly and backs Will towards the edge of the bed, still unmade. His hands, steadily looped into the hips of his jeans, slide to unbutton them without struggle or hesitation. When the edge of the mattress hits his knees, he complies without thought.

He thinks his heart might beat out of his chest. 

Without further resistance from Will, Hannibal too lowers himself to his knees, where just last night Will had lay flat on the ground, half under the bed and half uncovered, a poorly covered corpse of a man. Unreasonably, he wants to tell Hannibal he doesn’t have to sit there, there’s a hole to the other side of the world there and the ocean is empty and without his cutting reason to contend with him, simply drowning those that dissent or don’t have the sense to sleep. But Will doesn’t, because Hannibal stays, and the threads of his wool trousers are certainly catching on a spot where the polish has worn away. Those same hot hands are on the bareness of his skin, pushing his jeans and white briefs away, nails scratching until they leave lines and Will is well-trussed by his own clothing. The hands are not careful. They burn. They feel _so good_ -

“Cry if you like,” Hannibal rasps. "No reason to not have both."

\- and he takes the fullness of Will’s cock down past his teeth and tongue and throat with the surety of the way he speaks and dresses and styles his life, and that immutability is what does it. Will’s eyes widen with his mouth, and he has to bring a hand up to cover the shaking breath that leaves him out of shocked pleasure and the rush of sadness. 

“Oh,” is all he can manage before the force of his throat closing with tears stops anything else. He wants to curl back up half-dead under Hannibal’s legs, let his head leak from his eyes down beneath the slats in the floorboards and disappear. Will grasps at his own throat, and is so thankful to not have to make a decision. 

But Hannibal’s mouth is relentless and molten hot the way his hands are only suggestive of, and everything that gets inside him burns away, but that’s what Will wanted, to be hot and indulgent and reset with something that felt good and separate of what he’s supposed to do and keeps failing at. 

So Will cries, and Hannibal does as he always likes: tastes his way to a solution that pleases him. It feels like having all that heaviness drawn out of him to be forgotten, a small force next to Hannibal’s inexhaustible gravity. It feels like forever. It feels like a couple of seconds, drawn tight and strummed.

With a desperate sigh that comes from the cover of a running nose and salt-wet lips, Will watches as Hannibal pulls away with an obscenely wet sigh of his own, hand reaching up to replace his mouth at Will’s cock, rising to straddle Will’s legs. 

He grabs Will’s chin at first. He licks the orbital of his eyes, the carded eyelashes, the mucus and tears until he can work into Will’s mouth as well and feel the edges of sharp teeth and the soft inner cheeks. He acts like he’s stealing his way there, and in a way he is - it’s not what Will asked for, but it’s what Hannibal wants, and it’s equalizing to feel that equanimity, if only for the moment. Idly, Will thinks he tastes of the bitters in his drink, the sharpness rhubarb and lemon and acerbic sparkling wine. He tastes also of cheap whiskey, and cold night air. 

The hand at his chin knocks Will’s own hand away from his throat and bears down on it himself, thumb hooking up to pull at his bottom lip and reveal all the small hateful teeth that even now Will is contemplating bearing down on Hannibal’s tongue. ( _You want to make it bleed. You want to hear him hiss and take temptation back with him._ ) The pressure is familiar, his heart beating into the heat of Hannibal’s palm until he’s not sure if it’s his pulse or Hannibal’s that he feels. 

It’s too much. It’s what he needs. 

He comes choking, the nighttime a darkness that feels like a blanket to hide under and slip away. He takes in the image of the still-open front door. He takes in how close Hannibal’s face is, all the small pores, the filament bright greys and blonde hiding in his sideburns and brows. 

Hannibal, something red-eyed and needful himself is silent but snarling, pulling at Will’s hair with hands that are gentler than his ravaging face, shaking. His other hand eases Will from convulsing at the pull of his sore cock to trail upwards through his come, smearing and soaking it into the white undershirt, pinching at a tight nipple before having a taste himself, fingers glistening and dirty. He licks it away as one does honey on the palm - unreserved, enjoying it. If he needs the way that Will did, he says nothing, seemingly content. 

Will is boneless and tired, and Hannibal easily shuffles the two of them to lay side by side on the bed, as comfortably paired as canvases drawn to transition one phase into the next. ( _Who is first and who is next is anyone’s guess - you’re afraid to ask, and suspect you’d both have different answers._ ) He allows his head to be turned upwards into a pillow that smells of himself, Hannibal at his ear again, speaking such that Will doesn’t think he can properly understand right now. 

“Sois belle, et sois triste,” he says between sweat matted curls and the whorl of his ear, teeth catching. “Les pleurs ajoutent un charme au visage, comme le fleuve au paysage; l'orage rajeunit les fleurs.”

It’s nonsense to Will, and onwards he goes with it the way that insistent inspired men do. As Will’s heart slows and the tiredness retreats, so do the tears come back, hot on prickly cheeks that have been chafed by Hannibal’s own stubble at the end of a long day. They are petted away with careful searing thumbs, or left to seep past his eyes into his hair. Some catch inside his ears. Some find the back of his neck. 

It lasts longer than the orgasm, to the point that he starts to wonder now that he’s started, maybe he won’t be able to stop. He is watering a field with himself, dogs nosing at his toes, Hannibal murmuring into the crease of his pillow.

“Et crois que ton coeur s'illumine,” Hannibal whispers, barely audible. “Des perles que versent tes yeux.”

That it makes no sense helps. Will’s not confident that he can handle honesty from Hannibal anymore than he can handle his own still. The fluid, sacramental fervor of it hides the stickiness of his own come drying in his clothes and skin, and Hannibal wound around him like he could crush him given time.

( _You’re not ready for this emotion hiding on the other side of the tears. It’s heavier than the one you’re leaking out now._ )

It puts him to sleep. 

\---

It’s dark outside the next time he wakes. His pillow is damp from his mouth and his eyes. He is comfortably under the covers, shirtless and without pants but not quite naked. In some concession to modesty, and presumably what could have been avoiding Will having some sort of gay panic, his boxer briefs are the same if a little stretched at the waist, but otherwise he is clean. 

It’s restful in the house, with the little heater in front of the defunct fireplace and all the dogs curled into their respective beds. Nobody stirs when he does. There is no moon, and the porch lights are off, so the soft whiteness of the walls is no help, and he has to check himself in the blackness of the room. In the kitchen the stove light glows over the range - the analog green display of the microwave is a cascade across the countertops - 4:13 am is marching forward with or without him. 

There is also no Hannibal, made good on his promise to take a cab home.

Will doesn’t know how to feel about that more than the flaking discomfort of his own come, and the cotton-headed buzz of his head after crying so long. 

It’s probably for the best, though he tongues at a cut in his lip for some time, staring up to where he knows the trowel marks are. He sleeps another few hours, heavy like the shirt thrown on the chair rather than heavy beyond gravity’s reach. He’ll be creased in places, maybe stained, but it all comes out in the wash. Will’s face itches, maybe the one spot on him that hasn’t been meticulously cleaned. He’ll dig into that later, when the taste of lemon fades with it. 

He’ll turn on the phone when he can find it in the light. He’s resolved to not call out two days in a row, but everyone will survive if he’s a couple hours late to the office hours he doesn’t need to have, because he’s not conducting classes that mandate the need for office hours.

\---

Jack greets him at the door of his house at 7 in the morning. The black SUV of his car is an immovable brick from the windows, promising a difficult day. 

“Two more bodies for you to look at,” he says, stomping into the house as soon as the door opens an inch. “Where the fuck is your phone?” 

“Dead,” Will chokes out in a rush, trying to dress himself around a hangover and the sensation of being sized up. "Must have misplaced it yesterday, and didn't get to charge it last night." Seems Jack Crawford knows how to find him if he needs him after all. A day gone missing is not a day missed by anyone. Nobody mentions how clearly placed it is on the island counter of the kitchen, adjacent to the sink where not so long ago Abigail Hobbs' ear is clearly placed in the drain. Will had to choke that up too. 

\---

Going in for the Friday session after looking over the dead couple in the field and reconstructions of ancient bear skulls in the forensics lab is what Will imagines a long walk of shame must feel like. ( _“The worst!” says the museum attendant, and you nod. “The absolute worst.”_ ) The only way he is able to summon the courage to not abandon the appointment with Hannibal entirely is that he goes home when all of that bullshit is over to straighten himself up. He is showered, scrubbed immaculate, pressed into his shirt, and pressed up against the office entry door praying for God to strike him dead rather than know what happens next. 

Will should be thinking about the man that wants to be an animal. He should be considering the engineer behind the stolen teeth. He should be preparing to spar over observations, and pick Hannibal’s mind for the resource it is as a profiler, and the clarity he is often imparted between barbs. But he’s not. 

Will is pushing down a shame that chases him throughout the day when sleep fades and he can see the afterimages of his Thursday, like where Hannibal puts his car keys, and the still half-full tumbler of whiskey, and wonder if Jack saw them. He is shifting on his feet to offset the pressure in his head of thinking too much about how Alana would feel if she knew and how he does as someone that chose to do it anyway, forgetting her in exchange for his own moment. He is fighting the sensation of Hannibal’s tongue in the corners of his eyes, how they mop up the sadness and the relief of pleasure from there like those things belong to Hannibal, and Will hasn’t been swallowing them down himself for years. 

( _Something to make yourself sick on._ ) 

When Hannibal opens the door to the office and the mezzanine and pillars open up to him, as solemn and elegant as any other place on the D.C. mall, nothing much changes. “Come in, Will,” he says. “Thank you for making the drive.” The same things he says in perpetuity, before and after BSHCI. He’s wondered before if Hannibal records the first session, that he deliberately mimics himself as a tool of ritual. He wouldn’t put it past him. 

It does settle him though. 

It seems like it’s not going to come up - their little afternoon of watching Will come apart in different disappointments and vices and outbursts of emotion, something done between old friends or lovers meeting after several years. That their tryst is new makes it even scratchier in Will’s recollection of it, a new unfitted shirt with gaps at the waist and neck where the details can hide and go unmentioned. He’s halfway committed to mentioning it himself when Hannibal catches him by the elbow and gives one of his inscrutable portrait smiles. Harmless, without extended meaning. 

“You shouldn’t worry yourself so much. I did say a hall pass,” Hannibal says quietly. “Don’t be troubled by it - I'm not. Opportunities come for all sorts of things. If I can help provide it, all the better. Catharsis is a small thing made larger by the relief you feel in its aftershocks.”

“I thought we were in the business of confluences, not solitary outpourings,” Will says, feeling...he’s not sure what. The absence of mutualism. A new pit in his stomach. 

Hannibal watches for longer than is entirely comfortable, that kind of sleepless watchfulness that is common in statues, and other lidless eyed creatures. He is featureless in expression, though his eyes glow a bit with the intensity of his thoughts. He is resolved to something unseen. He nods, and takes a seat across from Will.

And they turn to the task at hand. Never to be mentioned again, he had said yesterday. Against a hard ache in his throat, Will has to concede that at least he was honest about that. 

"No beast is more savage than man when possessed with power answerable to his own rage,” Hannibal begins in earnest. 

( _You’ll have to hem in the fabric of how you feel about it for another time. Hannibal has - Hannibal, you’ll come to find, has set into motion a great number of things that will come due soon, because while you may choose to be honest on accident the day before and show him something that he covets, he was, in fact, with an agenda even if you weren’t._ ) 

“It's not rage,” says Will, disappointed, sad still but not so much as to not be able to stay afloat. “Rage is an emotional response to being provoked.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks, I hate the whole thing. 
> 
> If you've made it this far, I hope you enjoyed the one-shot from hell, and hope you like being miserable and navel-gazing to get to your porn. Hannibal is quoting the Sad Madrigal by Baudelaire here, which is more or less my Hannibal to Will poem du jour every day of the week.


End file.
